berg's father was an F.D.R. Democrat), the fate of the Red Sox was a regular din- ner topic, and a picture of Ted Williams on the wall was as prominent as one of John F. Kennedy. Walt went to public school, and in high school he started writing a column with his friend James Woods. By the time Woods gave it up to concentrate on acting, Walt "was mes- merized" by journalism. Mossberg was the first member of his family to attend college; he chose Brandeis over Brown, believing that it was "less stufl}r," and he majored in pol- itics. He joined protest marches against the war in Vietnam, worked for the college newspaper, and was a campus stringer for the Times; after his sopho- more year, he got a summer job as a re- porter at the Providence Journal. He had no mechanical ability, but his wife, Edith, whom he met at Brandeis, re- calls that when they went to the college library Walt would spend time scan- ning architecture magazines. Ira Shap- iro, a Washington lawyer and a former Clinton White House official, has been Mossberg's best friend since Brandeis, where they roomed together; he remem- bers Mossberg as someone perpetually curious about an "extraordinary range of things." Mossberg imagined a newspaper job in Washington. After Edith and Walt married, in the summer of 1969, they attended Columbia-Walt was at the journalism school and Edith at Teach- ers College. When they graduated, in @J / ,W, c,' ,. () [ J) --.J, -- , ------------- 1970 (with a high lottery number, he was in little danger of being drafted), the Wall Street Journal offered him the na- tional job he sought-in Detroit, not Washington. Detroit, with its huge automotive in- dustry, was then regarded as a plum as- signment, and the bureau included N or- man Pearlstine, who eventually became the newspaper's managing editor. Moss- berg stayed for three and a half years, and then transferred to Washington as one of two full-time labor reporters. His subsequent assignments included en- ergy, the Pentagon, and a three-and-a- half-year stint as deputy bureau chief; in 1989, he became the national-security correspondent. He was also developing another interest: in 1982, he bought his first computer, a somewhat primitive Timex Sinclair that he hooked up to a black-and-white TV. During the eight- ies, when the I.B.M. personal computer and then the Mac were born, comput- ers became his hobby. As a correspondent following Secre- tary of State James A. Baker, Mossberg found himself virtually living on air- planes. Margaret Tutwiler, then an Assistant Secretary of State, remem- bers Mossberg in the back of the plane debating with other reporters about whether a Mac was superior to a P.C. Ira Shapiro recalls a time when he didn't hear from his friend for weeks. One day, Shapiro telephoned and said, "What's the matter? We don't talk or see each h " ot er anymore. b OJ 8 fi1 l11LrJ? ''Let's go to that new place where they club something to death and cook it for you right there. " "Sorry," Mossberg said. "1' m very into " computers. He was also starting to miss being at home while his children-two sons- were growing up. In April of 1990, he made an appointment to see Pearlstine. He had decided what he wanted to do next: he didn't want to cover national security anymore; he wanted to write a technology column. Pearlstine liked the idea, despite the problems that he foresaw: the paper had never had an opinion columnist in its news pages, and Mossberg wanted to stay in Washington rather than move to Silicon Valley. "If I live and work among the industry, I will lose my focus as a consumer advocate," he said. In a seven- page, single-spaced prospectus that Mossberg sent to Pearlstine on May 1, 1991, he wrote: If it works as I envision it, this col- umn. . . would be the voice, the champion, of the individual person actually faced with buy- ing and using the core hi-tech devices-the customer whom industry calls the" end user." When the new job was settled, and Mossberg told Baker and Tutwiler that he was leaving the national-security beat, Baker was baffled. "To this day," Tutwiler told me, 'Jim Baker has never owned or operated a computer, or a BlackBerry, or a cell phone." Mossberg's initial column appeared on October 17,1991, and quickly be- came popular. 'When we do surveys of readers, we find that he scores very high," Paul Steiger, who became the Journal's top editor in 1992, when Pearlstine left the paper, says. In 1997, Pearlstine, who had become the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., wanted to hire Mossberg for three of the compa- ny's magazines and offered to double his salary, of approximately two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations, the Journal matched the Time Inc. offer. At the time of these discussions, Mossberg had a heart attack. He was fifty and, he says, "every male in my fam- ily when he reached his early fifties has had a heart attack." Doctors prepared him for a quadruple bypass, and, just days after the operation, Edith Mossberg recalls, "he had to go on the computer and check out the cardiologist and sur- geons." The contract negotiations helped